


the heart goes last

by parrishes



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Origin Story, Sibling Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-12
Updated: 2015-12-12
Packaged: 2018-05-06 09:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 661
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5411450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/parrishes/pseuds/parrishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Out of four siblings, Ethan is the only one who lives. They all go, all in different ways, and he is left alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the heart goes last

**Author's Note:**

> This is an origin story for Ethan that I've had posted on Tumblr for quite some time, and I thought I would transfer it over here; I'm posting it now before season three destroys all my (carefully crafted) headcanons. Title taken from Margaret Atwood's novel of the same name (which, sadly, I have not yet read), so that credit goes to her.

Ada dies first. His beautiful, gentle older sister, with her deer-brown eyes and her long dark hair, only twenty years old with all her life ahead of her.

Ethan remembers how the dogs on the property would follow her around, how their most irritable stallion would eat out of the palm of her hand, how their small garden bloomed and thrived under her care. 

 He remembers the smell of death in her room, the reek of her sickbed; remembers the convulsions and the fever, how she bled from the mouth and the eyes, how the purple rash spread across her limbs. 

By the time she died - in screaming agony all the way through; the doctor thinking he’d have to amputate her arm - the only thought in his mind was _if there was any mercy at all in this world, she would have died sooner._ He’s only seventeen, and the unyielding faith he was raised with takes its first hit. 

The gangrenous color of her flesh is the clearest memory of her now. 

Ada - or what is left of her - is buried without pomp or ceremony in the church burying ground, and at the end of the funeral their father walks away from the pine wood of her exposed coffin, without saying a word. 

-

Charles goes next, his rakish older brother with his impish grin. Charles, twenty-two to Ethan’s eighteen; hot-headed and lively, never one to shrink away from a challenge. Charles, always too brave for his own damn good.

Ethan remembers pulling pranks with his big brother: leaving stall doors unlatched, making “bombs” out of cow manure, putting frogs in the tack room. He remembers saddling up their favorite horses and riding to the cliff overlooking the valley and the river, staring down at it all in wonder, the sunset warm against their faces. 

Charles is run down by a bull, trapped in the corral, gutted against the wooden fence, in full view of Ethan and their father and God and everyone. Time was frozen, and so was he.

Ethan remembers Charles, gored and bleeding and full of holes, still grinning. He remembers leaping over the gate, holding his brother’s hand as he dies; their father still staring dispassionately, disapprovingly, from the other side of the fence. 

Charles is buried next to Ada (a year apart in death as they were in life), headstone tall and proud in the damp red earth, and Ethan can’t help but wonder who is going to die next.

-

Lydia disappears between night and morning. Lively little Lydia, the baby of the family, too young to remember Ada’s drawn-out, agonizing illness, or the sight of horns buried in Charles’ gut. She’s thirteen years younger than him. She’s all he has left. 

He remembers her as a toddler, babbling happily about just learning to walk, always on his heels or his brother’s as they ran around the farm. He remembers how Ada and Charles loved her, how they all did, how Charles held her up to pet the horses. He remembers how unafraid of everything she was. 

He’s in the army by the time she vanishes at sixteen, the ranch and all its memories too painful, ever-present. He’s home on furlough when his father tells him that he sent her away for “improper behavior.”

She was sent to school. Back east. He doesn’t know where, and despite everything he tries - pleading, pleasantry, acquiescing to the old man’s sadistic whims - he never learns. 

So back to the army he goes, fighting and drinking and killing his way through his memories. He’s good at it. He tries not to think about what that means. 

Home again a year later, on a second furlough, his father hands him a letter postmarked Virginia and walks away. 

Lydia, cholera. Lydia, dead. Lydia, with her bright blue eyes and her wide smile. Lydia, buried in some unknown grave. 

Home, meaningless. His faith goes first, his heart goes last. 

He’s the only one left.


End file.
